King John Caves: On June 15, 1215, King John of England put his seal on the Magna Carta at Runnymede, a field west of London, after months of pressure from a group of rebellious barons. His rule had become deeply unpopular due to high taxes, failed military campaigns in France, and arbitrary justice. The barons had taken up arms and even captured London, forcing John to negotiate.

The Magna Carta was essentially a peace agreement. It laid out a set of demands from the barons that aimed to limit the king’s power, especially in taxation and legal matters. It required the king to follow certain rules, like obtaining consent for new taxes and guaranteeing that free men had a right to a fair trial.

Though the document was meant to prevent civil war, it didn’t succeed immediately. John asked the Pope to annul it just weeks later, and fighting broke out again. Still, the Magna Carta symbolized the idea that rulers are not above the law. Over time, parts of it were reissued and expanded, influencing future legal systems, including the US Constitution and the development of modern democracies.

AI & Technology

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity (Apple)
Even though new models are getting better at showing their work, this study finds that their “reasoning” starts to fall apart once puzzles hit a certain level of difficulty. The authors built a controlled testing environment to isolate and study how these models think, not just whether they get the right answer, and what they found is that the extra thinking steps often don’t help past a point. Strikingly, models actually put in less effort on harder problems, suggesting that today’s reasoning models might still be more surface-level than they seem. It is interesting to note that this study comes from Apple, who has generally been perceived to be behind the AI race. [Link]